Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri reiterated his call for jihad against the Syrian dictatorship in a message posted on the Internet yesterday. The conflict in Syria pits the Assad regime, Iran and Hezbollah against the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and the Arab states. Non-Islamist Syrians desiring genuine democracy, including the Christian minority, are caught in-between.

Zawahiri tells Muslims to support the uprising “with all that he can, with his life, money, opinion, as well as information.” The message comes after 25 were killed and 175 were wounded in two suicide bombings in Aleppo of security service buildings. The attacks are believed to have been directly ordered by Ayman al-Zawahiri and carried out by Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq.

He is especially concerned about how foreign powers will influence the Syrian opposition as it looks for outside help.

“Our people in Syria, don’t rely on the West or the United States or Arab governments and Turkey,” Zawahiri says.

His video was released on the same day that the Arab League asked the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force into Syria and agreed to “materially” support the opposition, likely paving the way for military assistance to the Free Syria Army that is fighting the regime’s forces.

The Muslim Brotherhood, unlike Al-Qaeda, is happy to accept foreign military intervention if it will lead to victory. Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the top Brotherhood cleric, declared that it is permissible for Muslims to welcome U.N.-backed intervention in Syria if the Arab states are unable to stop the violence.

Al-Qaeda has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Assad regime. Syria has imprisoned members of Al-Qaeda, as the terrorist group is ideologically committed to replacing the regime with Islamist rule. Assad has also helped Al-Qaeda when their interests have aligned, particularly in Iraq and Lebanon. Relations between Iraq and Syria hit the breaking point in 2009 when the Iraqis released evidence that the Assad regime was backing Al-Qaeda and other terrorists carrying out attacks in Iraq. The relationship has healed since then as Iranian influence over Iraq has grown.

The Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister says that terrorists are crossing the border into Syria and shipping arms to the opposition fighting Assad. The price of a Kalashnikov assault rifle has increased from $100-200 to $1000-$1500 because of the rise in demand, he claims. However, the Iraqi government is backing Assad and could just be trying to substantiate the dictatorship’s claims that it is only fighting “armed gangs” and terrorists.

Since coming to power in 2000, Bashar Assad’s strategy has been to portray his regime as the only thing stopping an Islamist takeover. Secular democratic voices are silenced while the jihadist rhetoric of Islamists is often allowed. The regime recently released a top Al-Qaeda prisoner, Abu Musab al-Suri, who used to lead the terrorist group’s operations in Europe. He oversaw the 2005 bombings in London and was involved in the 2004 bombings in Madrid.

There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn’t want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.

Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn’t get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital “H.” Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it’s on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don’t think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.

Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don’t just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.

The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.

Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.

Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there’s someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.

Self-interest is Israel’s original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.

With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world’s capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven’t managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.

Israel’s insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.

As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel’s modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.

While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history– which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.

In 1868, a British army led by Sir Robert Napier sailed from India to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to rescue several English and European hostages from the mentally unstable, sadistic King Theodore. Theodore had become enraged a few years earlier because his letter to Queen Victoria asking for military assistance had been ignored, and so he retaliated by taking the hostages. Napier’s expedition required the building of a port, railroad, and road in order for his army of 13,000 soldiers to march to Theodore’s stronghold Magdala, 400 brutal miles from the coast. After the three-month march, the British met Theodore’s army at Magadala and routed it. The hostages were released, and Theodore committed suicide. Then Napier led his army back to the coast and sailed away, surprising many who believed that rescuing the hostages was a pretext for colonial expansion.

The Abyssinian expedition illustrates the British awareness that an empire must defend not just its material interests, but also its prestige. Insults and injuries to its citizens cannot be tolerated, for rivals and enemies will interpret such forbearance as a weakness to be exploited. The expedition was an expensive, massive undertaking, but one necessary in order to warn the Empire’s potential enemies that England would pay any price to defend its honor and interests. Power is not just about material resources, but also the perceptions of others that power will be used, a perception that works as a force multiplier. As Vergil says in the Aeneid, “They have power because they seem to have power.”

History is filled with examples of how costly it is for a nation to allow its prestige to be damaged, thus weakening its power and inviting aggression. By 1938, Hitler had no respect for the English or the French despite their combined military might, given their failure to respond to Germany’s serial violations of the Versailles settlement over the previous two decades. Thus Hitler’s brilliant manipulation of diplomacy in the Czechoslovakia crisis, when England and France, as Churchill would write later, “presented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together.” Hitler agreed: a year later, he would respond to England and France’s guarantee of Poland’s security by sneering, “I saw them at Munich. They are little worms.”

Likewise the U.S. paid the price for its loss of prestige following the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. As Jimmy Carter publicly announced a “crisis of confidence,” fretted over America’s “recent mistakes” and “recognized limits,” and cut spending on the military, an emboldened Soviet Union went on a geopolitical rampage throughout the Third World. Equally ominous was the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the embassy hostages, a grievous affront to our prestige met with toothless sanctions, U.N. resolutions, secret negotiations, and the whole repertoire of excuses to substitute talk for action. A byproduct of this blow to U.S. prestige was the creation of an oil-rich jihadist regime in the heart of the Middle East, one that immediately started creating and supporting terrorist groups that for 30 years have murdered Americans. A series of jihadist attacks followed Iran’s victory over the superpower America, from the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, to the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, none of which were met with a punitive response that would have made clear the overwhelming price to be paid for assaulting America’s interests and citizens. So it was no surprise that Osama bin Laden, convinced that America was a “weak horse” with “foundations of straw,” on September 11, 2001 sent his jihadists to attack the very centers of American power and prestige in Washington D.C. and New York.

The dismissed court case involving a Jewish student attacked by a Muslim student last year at the University of California at Berkeley is still alive. Jessica Felber, 21, was injured by Husam Zakharia, leader of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), during a rally while holding a sign that said, “Israel Wants Peace.” Zakharia rammed her from behind with a shopping cart. The case was dismissed at the end of December when U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg ruled, astonishingly, that the assault was “an act of protected free speech.”

In her suit, Felber alleges that UC Berkeley did not effectively deal with the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students by the SJP and Muslim Students Association [MSA], leading to “a dangerous and threatening environment.” The groups staged mock “checkpoints” on campus, where they waved imitation weapons around and demanded of passing students, “Are you Jewish?” Jewish students were allowed to pass (although some were verbally harassed) while Muslim or Arab students were “detained.” The checkpoints were meant to mimic the Israeli Defense Force’s security measures against Palestinian terror attacks.

The suit lists other instances of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility at Berkeley and other California campuses. It notes that Zakharia and two other SJP activists were cited in 2008 for battery after disrupting a college rally by a campus Jewish group and assaulting a Jewish student. SJP members also heckled Mideast expert Daniel Pipes and author Nonie Darwish when the two came to speak at UC Berkeley in 2004 and 2007 respectively. The hecklers allegedly shouted “Death to Zionism,” “Zionism is racism,” and the infamous Nazi salutation “Sieg Heil” during Pipes’ presentation.

UC Berkeley administrators had been warned that growing Muslim extremism on campus was putting Jewish students at risk, and that the excessive and violent on-campus actions of the SJP and the MSA clearly constituted “hostile environment” harassment. The suit charges that the administrators were well aware of this and could have prevented the assault but did nothing, and that their duty to do so arises from the fact that the SJP and MSA are on University of California property and are subject to the Regents’ control and discipline.

Indeed, the suit alleges, UC Berkeley’s policies “fostered and encouraged” pro-terrorist incitement, “turned a blind eye to the perpetrators of illegal activities,” and “failed to effectively discipline the MSA and SJP for their pro-terrorist programs, goals and conduct; despite having ample notice that such violence was foreseeable.” By failing to provide security to Jewish and pro-Israel students, UC Berkeley “condoned and allowed the MSA, the SJP and MSU [Muslim Student Union] to threaten, harass and intimidate Jewish students and to endanger their health and safety.”

In an interview with FrontPage managing editor Jamie Glazov, Felber’s attorney Neal Sher, former head of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and of the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit, noted that

the University seems to be a slave to political correctness. And, I suspect that there is an element of intimidation stemming from the actions of the anti-Israel crowd, who have been loud and persistent in pushing their agenda. And, some university officials might have mistakenly bought into the deceitful propaganda being spread by those who seek to de-legitimize the Jewish state and her supporters.

Journalism watchdog Reporters Without Borders recently made headlines when it demoted the United States in its annual rankings of press freedom for an alleged “crackdown” on reporters covering Occupy Wall Street. Not only was that downgrade deeply tendentious, but it served to obscure a far graver threat to press freedom: the ongoing assault on independent media in Latin America.

The rise of populist left-wing leaders in Latin America has been an unmitigated disaster for the independent press. For all their appeals to democracy, strongman leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega have been unwilling to submit to democratic scrutiny from the media. Intolerant of dissent, they have launched crackdowns on journalists and media owners with the ultimate goal of curtailing the influence and independence of the press and eliminating one of the few remaining challenges to their power. To a troubling extent, they have succeeded.

Hugo Chavez has long been on the frontlines of the war against the media. Since becoming president in 1999, Chavez has worked to build up a loyalist media empire that would drown out independent and critical media – or, in Chavez’s neo-Marxist parlance, free him from the “media dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” In 2005, for instance, he set up TELESUR, a state-run network that functions as his personal propaganda outlet. If there is to be a media dictatorship in Venezuela, Chavez clearly intends to run it himself.

At the same time, Chavez has tried to crush the country’s independent media. Government regulations have forced the closure of radio and cable television stations critical of his government, while independent media outlets have been forced to shut down after the government denied their broadcasting licenses. Such has been the fate of Venezuela’s oldest private channel, Radio Caracas Television. RCTV was forced off the air in 2007, after the government refused to renew its license because it did not toe Chavez’s party line. That left just one independent channel in Venezuela, Globovision, a problem the government solved in December 2010 by becoming a minority shareholder in the company and forcing a Chavez crony onto Globovision’s board of directors. In this hostile environment, journalists and media directors understandably have chosen self-censorship rather than risk losing their job by angering the Chavez government.

Chavez isn’t alone in seeing independent media as a threat to his regime. In Ecuador, the leftist President Rafael Correa has taken his Venezuelan ally’s strategy of media intimidation and politically driven censorship even further. Given that Correa hails from academia, where he was a professor of economics, there was early hope that he would take a more lenient view of press independence. Instead, in what the Washington Post has called “the most comprehensive and ruthless assault on free media underway in the Western Hemisphere,” Correa has tried to deploy Ecuador’s laws and the judiciary to bring the media to heel and to silence his critics, all while subjecting journalists to legal and personal harassment.

One recent example of these tactics is Correa’s campaign against the Ecuadoran newspaper El Universo. The campaign traces its origins to September 2010, when Correa tried to enter a police station in the capital of Quito to calm police officers angry about a new government law limiting bonus pay and extending the time required for promotions. When the angry police officers rioted, Correa sought safety in a police hospital and ultimately had to call in the military to come to his aid. Shots were fired in the ensuing rescue. The incident prompted a column from El Universo editorial page editor Emilio Palacio, in which he called Correa a “dictator” and implied that Correa had ordered the military to fire on the hospital, putting civilians’ lives at risk. Outraged, Correa denied the charges and claimed that the column was defamatory. Spurning the paper’s offer to publish a statement in response, Correa instead filed suit against Palacio and the paper’s owners, citing “aggravated defamation of a public official.” In July of 2011, Palacio and the owners were sentenced to three years in jail while the paper was hit with $40 million in fines. Suspiciously, five different judges presided over the case. The defense also presented evidence that the harsh verdict, issued in just 24 hours by yet another surrogate judge, was ghostwritten by Correa’s personal lawyer. Whatever the truth, critics have pointed out that the Ecuador’s strict libel laws will inevitably lead to more media self-censorship.

Three distinguished guests recently joined The Glazov Gang, Frontpage’s television program, to shed light on The High Price of Telling the Truth about Islam — the title of Eric Allen Bell’s recent Frontpage article. Our guests were Eric Allen Bell, a writer and filmmaker who was recently fired from the “Daily Kos” for telling the truth about Islam, Nonie Darwish, author of the new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, and Mark Tapson, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Below is Part I of a three part series. We will run Part II in tomorrow’s issue.

To get the whole story on why the Left suppresses the truth about Islam, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Once again for the Obama administration, lofty promises are giving way to hard reality. On September 22, 2010, in an informal discussion regarding the healthcare bill, the president contended that “as a consequence of the Affordable Care Act, premiums are going to be lower than they would be otherwise; health care costs overall are going to be lower than they would be otherwise. And that means, by the way, that the deficit is going to be lower than it would be otherwise.” That was then. Over the weekend it was revealed that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the chief architect of ObamaCare, backtracked on the analysis he performed two years ago. He told officials in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado the price of insurance premiums will “dramatically increase” under the reforms.

Gruber didn’t merely rebut the president’s contention. He rebutted his own, made in 2009, after he reviewed a report by the insurance industry that contended premiums would rise sharply with the passage of the healthcare bill. At that time Mr. Gruber argued that the industry report failed to take into account government subsidies provided to help moderate-income Americans purchase insurance, or administrative overhead costs he predicted would “fall enormously” once insurance polices were sold through the anticipated government-regulated marketplaces, or exchanges. “If you literally take the data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) you can see that individuals will be saving money in a nongroup market,” he said.

The CBO was less sanguine, saying it couldn’t forecast what would happen to premiums because “so many uncertain variables come into play.”

Some of the so-called variables surrounding Obamacare have already come into play. First and foremost were the waivers to the plan, issued by an administration with a track record of doing favors for certain constituencies. The actual number of waivers granted remains in question. The Hill claims that as of January, 1,231 companies had received waivers from the plan. ABC News had the number at 1,471 in July of 2011.

Regardless, Republicans contended that the waivers were either politically inspired or represented a fundamental flaw with the legislation. “I think it is an understatement to say that these waivers have been controversial,” said Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, during an interview in March  of 2011. “If they needed a waiver in 2011, won’t they need a waiver in 2012, 2013?” Steven Larsen, head of a section of the Health and Human Services department that oversees President Barack Obama’s health care law disagreed. “The annual limit waiver process has been carried out in a way that reflects a commitment to transparency and responsible implementation,” he said. “The overriding purpose of this waiver program is to ensure that Americans do not lose their health coverage before better health insurance options become available in 2014.”

Who’s right? On Friday June 17, 2011, the Obama administration announced it was ending the program as of September 22, 2011 in order to avoid what the Huffington Post characterized as a “potential political distraction ahead of next year’s elections.” Political albatross might have been a bit more accurate.

The next variable that came into play was the CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports) Act. The original premise of the CLASS Act, a government-sponsored long-term care plan similar to those available in the private sector, was that it would be self-supporting. Those who signed up for the voluntary program would have paid a monthly premium of about $100 for insurance coverage promising cash benefits averaging no less than $50 a day. Furthermore, the CBO, which scored the healthcare bill as reducing the deficit by $210 billion in the years 2012-2021, contended that $86 billion of these savings came from CLASS. Why? Because the program would have taken in premiums for five years, before it paid out claims, making it appear to be “deficit-reducing”–in the near term.

Yet there were doubts about the ability of the program to be self-sustaining from the start, especially if a smaller group of relatively unhealthy Americans were the majority of users. Naysayers also noted that once the program got beyond the ten-year window used to calculate the above CBO numbers, the program would be inundated by cost overruns. As a result, Congress voted that the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary had to ensure that the program would be sustainable for 75 years before certifying it.

Resistance to a new bill aimed at limiting foreign law in Pennsylvania courts serves as a case study of how Islamists and their allies operate: peddling falsehoods about Shari’a, painting Muslims as victims, and denying that anyone seeks to institutionalize aspects of Islamic law — even as they vigorously promote that very agenda. With similar legislation being debated across the U.S., understanding their tactics is critical.

At issue in Pennsylvania is House Bill (HB) 2029, which stipulates that “a tribunal shall not consider a foreign legal code or system which does not grant … the same fundamental liberties, rights and privileges” as guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions. Introduced in November, it follows the American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) model and makes no mention of Shari’a. A preliminary memo sent to legislators last June in the name of Rep. RoseMarie Swanger, HB 2029’s chief sponsor, does highlight Islamic law, but she later said that it had been circulated accidentally. Regardless, concerns about Shari’a are warranted due to its many provisions that conflict with the standards of American jurisprudence. For example, it disadvantages women in terms of inheritance, divorce, child custody, and other areas of family law. Shari’a already has shaped numerous cases nationwide, including in Pennsylvania, where one state court decided how assets should be distributed according to Islam.

Pushback against HB 2029 has been led by the Philadelphia office of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-PA) and was punctuated by an interfaith press conference (video here) at CAIR-PA headquarters on December 14. The overall campaign reflects CAIR’s usual recipe of distortion, victimology, and contradiction between words and deeds.

Attacks on bills like HB 2029 begin by sowing confusion about Shari’a. Because Islamic law encompasses virtually every facet of life — governing personal activities such as eating and worship, but also forming an oppressive social and legal structure — suit-and-tie Islamists work to emphasize its unthreatening pieces whenever possible. CAIR-PA executive director Moein Khawaja’s suggestion that Shari’a should worry Pennsylvanians no more than halal gyros is a fine example of this technique.

Others brazenly misrepresent the unsavory components, as Haider Ala Hamoudi, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, did when he was interviewed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Hamoudi insisted that women and children would suffer if judges could not consider Shari’a — a stretch, given how it discriminates against women, including in disputes over children. Moving beyond the types of cases that are adjudicated in U.S. courts, he depicted the requirement of testimony by four male witnesses to convict someone of adultery as an exemplar of Islamic enlightenment that protects against false accusations. In practice, however, it can be a nightmare for women in those Muslim countries where the same scriptural passages are interpreted as mandating four witnesses even to prove rape. Robert Spencer further explains, “If the required male witnesses can’t be found, the victim’s charge of rape becomes an admission of adultery,” too often leading to her imprisonment.

Hamoudi also contended that harsh punishments used in Iran and elsewhere, like cutting off hands for stealing, have little to do with Shari’a and are “more a matter of identity politics” in response to Western influence. The man deserves credit for artful misdirection, as it is not every day that brutal penalties prescribed by the Koran itself are chalked up to blowback from cultural imperialism.

When distortion of Shari’a is insufficient, Islamists and their collaborators characterize Muslims as the targets of a shadowy cabal of “Islamophobes.” Hence, Pennsylvanians were treated to Marwan Kreidie, a major figure in the Philadelphia Islamist scene, describing Swanger’s faith-neutral bill as “an exercise in discrimination” and claiming that “there’s a conspiracy afoot here.” CAIR-PA’s Khawaja followed up by taking the ad hominem route, trashing HB 2029 as the brainchild of “anti-Muslim, white supremacist David Yerushalmi.” See Yerushalmi’s recent article for a reply to the typical assaults on his character.

Yet no hyperbole topped that of Rabbi Linda Holtzman, who played the Nazi card at CAIR-PA’s press conference. “The echoes for me are strong of Germany in the 1930s,” she said, “when repeatedly Jewish law was brought forward and defamed in the courts as a means of defaming all of Jewish tradition.” Aside from the sheer ugliness of the analogy, Shari’a could be “defamed” only by spreading inaccuracies about it. HB 2029 does not reference Islam or Islamic law, while the memo correctly labels Shari’a as “inherently hostile to our constitutional liberties.” Sometimes the truth hurts.

Islamists also maintain that bills such as HB 2029 are unnecessary because, they say, there is no attempt by adherents of Islam to undermine the American legal system, but their actions away from the cameras inevitably belie their soothing words. Indeed, not long after it issued a press release dismissing concerns about the advance of Shari’a as “conspiracy theories” to be “mocked,” CAIR-PA announced that its 2012 banquet will be headlined by two men who have expressed support for transforming the U.S. into a Shari’a-run state: Siraj Wahhaj and Sherman Jackson.

Listening to the radio on two or three occasions since the beginning of February, I’ve heard reporters  out on the street asking black passersby which men and women in African-American history they look up to.  The occasion, of course, is Black History Month.

For most of the passersby I heard, the question seemed to be a surprisingly difficult one.  Many of them could come up with only one name: Martin Luther King, Jr.  Some, after a bit of prodding, added Malcolm X.  A few mentioned Oprah.  One named Will Smith.  What was perhaps surprising – or perhaps not – is that only a couple thought of President Obama.

I’m of two minds about a “history month” devoted to any particular group, whether blacks, gays, women, Latinos, short people, bald guys, or whatever.  On the one hand, Americans don’t need to be given any more encouragement to think of themselves as members of groups – we’ve already gone too far down that road.  On the other hand, Americans desperately need to know more about their own history.  Not, of course, from the narrow and hostile perspective of Howard Zinn and company, but from a comprehensive perspective that, while certainly not overlooking the dark chapters of our country’s past, acknowledges that the American story is unique, extraordinary, and incomparably inspiring – and that its principal actors have come from every corner of the earth.

Another consideration is that black Americans, like members of pretty much every other group, have often been taught to idolize certain other members of their group who simply don’t deserve their respect.  Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson, anyone?  Al “Tawana Brawley” Sharpton?  Talk to young people who’ve taken courses in Black Studies and they’ll tell you that their heroes include unspeakable creeps like Huey Newton and Angela Davis.  It’s appalling.  Many revere Muhammed Ali, but while they know about the bigotry to which he was so cruelly subjected, they’re clueless about his own history of appalling prejudice.

Then there’s the nearly ubiquitous contemporary tendency to use the word “hero” almost as a synonym for “celebrity.”  So one ends up with young people whose black “heroes” are basketball players – or hip-hop artists who are at least as well known for their rap sheets as for their rap.

My own feeling, while listening to those radio interviews, was that if we’re going to have a Black History Month, let’s take advantage of the occasion to inform young Americans today – of whatever skin color – about great black Americans of the past whom they may not know about but who helped to turn America into a greater and more tolerant country.

People like Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in Gone With the Wind and won the first acting Oscar ever given to a black person.  Even as a top-flight movie star, McDaniel was subjected to humiliating prejudice (she wasn’t invited to attend the Atlanta premiere of GWTW), but she endured it with immense self-respect and self-discipline, working as a maid when she couldn’t get acting jobs playing maids.  She was not an activist in the narrowest sense, but, as the wonderful actress Fay Bainter said in presenting the award to McDaniel, her Oscar victory was itself a triumph for the cause of true diversity, “enabl[ing] us to embrace the whole of America – an America that we love, and an America that, almost alone in the world today, recognizes and pays tribute to those who have given their best, regardless of creed, race, or color.”

And what about Zora Neale Hurston, whose eloquent, achingly beautiful 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is infinitely better than anything Toni Morrison or Alice Walker ever wrote?  Unlike many other prominent black Americans of her day, Hurston was no fan of the New Deal, which she saw as a formula for dependency.  If she was about anything, it was individual independence, writing:

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

The Arab Spring brought Egyptians new freedoms: kidnapping and robbing American tourists, the arrest of 43 NGO workers, including 19 Americans, senseless killings, endless riots and chaos, burning of churches and the killing and kidnapping of Christians.

Arrests of Westerners and accusing some of espionage and stirring up the riots and attacking and accusing Christians of working with the enemies of Islam, is nothing new and is almost always politically motivated. Focusing on the outside non-Muslim world rather than focusing on urgent internal matters and taking responsibility for previous failures has always been the norm in almost all Muslim countries, especially Egypt. With a straight face, an Egyptian MP recently commented on the Egyptian soccer riots that resulted in the killing of over 75 people and injuring hundreds, by saying “This anarchy is caused by America, Israel and the former regime.”

Blaming Israel and America has reached pathological levels and Western media keeps ignoring it thinking it will go away. Blaming the outside world has always managed to work in confusing the public, deflecting their anger against the system and placing the blame on the outside evil infidel world and the treasonous non-Muslim minorities. Arab obsession with the blame game is deeply rooted in a religion that is obsessed with jihad and conquering the outside world. 62% of the Koran focuses on the infidels and not on conquering the hearts of Muslims to peace and loving one’s neighbor.

Even though Mohammed Tantawi, leader of the Egyptian transitional government, was thought of as a friend of America, his friendship must quickly evaporate in a culture where showing any friendship or loyalty to the West can be a life or death situation. The West must always be put in its infidel dhimmi place, Western interests must be challenged and a good dose of humiliation of Western leaders every now and then will certainly increase the popularity of any Islamic regime. I always believed that tyranny in Muslim countries often originates from the bottom up.

Pushing the buttons of the Westerners and rubbing their noses in the ground, insulting and slandering them and spreading outright lies, throwing shoes at them, arresting Westerners, and accusing every tourist of being a CIA agent has become the normal political tactic for internal political gains. Ahmadinejad’s popularity in Egypt skyrocketed after he insulted America and its leader in NY and in the UN. While the West is trying to rescue third world nations, the Islamic third world wants to use every opportunity to denigrate and destroy them. The bitterness, anger, envy and resentment is filling the heart of the Muslim world and it stands in the way of any hope for reform within Islam.

The Hollywood Reporter wrote this week about Dr. Ted Baehr’s Movieguide Awards, handed out to the most family friendly films of the year.  According to the Reporter, “The report praises such 2011 releases as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Battle: Los Angeles, Moneyball, We Bought a Zoo and Hugo while heaping scorn on the likes of Super 8, Red State, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Bad Teacher and Happy Feet Two.”

Just as importantly, the report demonstrated that such family friendly films are significantly more lucrative than non-family friendly films: “Movieguide identified 91 movies in 2011 that scored high in ‘conservative/moral categories’; these earned an average of $59 million apiece. On the other hand, it identified 105 movies that scored high in ‘liberal/leftist categories’; each of those titles earned an average of just $11 million.  The average movie scoring four stars from Movieguide earned $53.5 million while the ones that scored just one star earned $10.6 million.”

“Most moviegoers want good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness,” said Baehr.

Baehr’s exactly right.  But there’s another element that’s just as important as morality in determining whether a movie makes money or not: who goes to see it.  And family friendly films are just that: family friendly.  You can bring your kids to them, your wife to them.  While I may love Team America: World Police, it’s not exactly the sort of thing I’m going to take my wife to see (in fact, I told my mom that it was too old for her).  On the other hand, there’s nothing in Moneyball that anyone from age 13 can’t see.  Family films, in other words, have an automatic demographic advantage over non-family friendly films – take a movie ticket and multiply it by three to start.

So why is Hollywood so addicted to making drivel like A Dangerous Method?  It really comes down to the Cocktail Party Mentality.  In Hollywood, all business is social.  That means you get jobs based on which parties you attend, which bigwigs you hobnob with, and which rears you kiss.  There are no families at these parties – no kids allowed.  You’re more likely to see a child being molested at a Hollywood party a la Roman Polanski than to see a child being shuttled around by her doting parents.

On Monday, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas let the cat out of the bag again. In the presence of Qatar’s rabidly anti-Israel Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa, and alongside Hamas’s exiled Politburo chief, Khaled Meshal, Abbas’s Fatah party signed a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, paving the way for the formation of a Palestinian unity government. With the stroke of a pen, Abbas’s prior assertion that “there are no more differences between [Fatah and Hamas]” was sanctified. Abbas officially considers as a primary Palestinian aim the annihilation of Israel.

And to alleviate all doubt (or misplaced hope), when asked the next day whether the reconciliation agreement would “moderate” Hamas, Political Bureau member Izzat al-Rishq declared: “The Palestinian people maintain their right to all forms of resistance, and we are committed to armed resistance…to confront the…Zionist enemy’s plans.” Abbas is now openly complicit in this murderous endeavor.

As for the so-called “international community,” the response was relatively muted.

A spokesman at the US mission in Tel Aviv said the Obama administration would not articulate a “formal position on a speculative event,” but rather would “wait to see what happens.”

If only Israel’s “speculative” approval of the construction of a few hundred houses in its capital city drew such remarks.

Surprisingly, the EU also refrained from assuming an official stance. However, given the EU’s reaction in November following a previous round of reconciliation talks—“[the EU has] consistently called for reconciliation under Abbas’ authority”—no doubt the Europeans still consider Hamas’s inclusion in Palestinian politics as “an opportunity rather than a threat,” as well as, incredibly, and without justification, “essential for securing a lasting peace with Israel.”

Less surprising was UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s message to Abbas: Fatah’s reconciliation with a terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction should not be viewed as contradictory or mutually exclusive from negotiating with the Jewish state. In a twisted sense, Ki-moon is correct. Abbas’s partnership with genocidal Hamas will in no manner affect his policy of rejecting direct negotiations with Israel.

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu left little to the imagination: “Hamas is a terrorist organization that strives to destroy Israel, and which is supported by Iran. I have said many times in the past that the Palestinian Authority must choose between an alliance with Hamas and peace with Israel. Hamas and peace do not go together.… If Abu Mazen [Abbas] implements what has been signed, he will have chosen to abandon the way of peace[.]”

The chatter about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities has become loud and dangerous.  At one point the Netanyahu government found the extensive discussion related to an imminent Israeli attack on Iran useful, as it expedited Western action against Iran in the form of tougher sanctions.  However, all this talk may now put Israel in a dangerous position wherein Iran may use it as a pretext to strike first.

A February 2 report in the Washington Post that stated “U.S. Secretary of Defense is concerned Israel will launch an attack before Iran enters so-called ‘immunity zone’ when military strike won’t bust Iran’s nuclear facilities.”  Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is reported as saying that he believes that Israel will attack Iran in April, May or June.  The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote that Panetta thinks that Israel will attack because after the ‘immunity zone’ expires the nuclear facilities will be heavily fortified and a military strike will no longer succeed.

On Sunday, February 5, 2012 President Obama was interviewed on NBC-TV during the Super Bowl pre-game show. In the interview, Obama contradicted his Defense Secretary, saying he “does not think Israel has decided whether to attack Iran over the disputed nuclear program.” The president added, “I don’t think Israel has made a decision on what they need to do, we are going to make sure that we work in lockstep, as we proceed to try to solve this – hopefully, diplomatically.”

In an Earlier NBC program top figures in the U.S. and Israeli defense establishments were interviewed and confirmed that Israel has long-range Jericho missiles whose warheads can penetrate Iran’s nuclear facilities.  According to these experts, while the warheads will be conventional and not nuclear, their accuracy can be depended upon. They further suggested that Israel would employ F-15i fighter planes along with the Jericho missiles that have a range of 2400 kilometers. In addition, they speculated, Israel would use its drones, and flight paths that would conserve fuel consumption.  The experts believe that Israel will not employ cruise missiles from its submarines since Israel does not have enough of them in its arsenal.

According to this same report, Israel would target only those facilities which are critical to Iran’s nuclear bomb weaponization strategy.  American military experts believe that such an attack would delay Iran’s nuclear development by at least two to four years.  Israeli experts however estimate that the attack will set back the Iranian plans three to five years, and that if Iran persists in its plans to acquire a bomb, Israel would then attack again in four years.

U.S. Intelligence assessments prepared in the summer of 2011 concluded that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, internet cables, cell phone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.

Israel, according to these intelligence sources, has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cell phone signal that commands a cell network to “sleep;” thus stopping transmissions.  The Israelis, they suggest, have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, speaking at the Herzliya Conference on February 3, 2012, stated that “if sanctions don’t achieve the desired goal of stopping Iran’s military nuclear program, there will be a need to consider taking action.”  Barak views Iran as nearing the stage “which may render any physical strike as impractical,” and he said, “A nuclear Iran will be more complicated to deal with, more dangerous and more costly in blood then if it were stopped today.  In other words, he who says in English ‘later’ may find that later is too late.”

[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at  the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” This article first appeared in our Feb 7 issue and we have decided to rerun it due to the massive interest and reaction it received. Don't miss Eric Bell on Frontpage's television program, The Glazov Gang.]

A strange thing happened to me the other day when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles.  There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on.  As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide.  I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered.  It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported.  But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support.  As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read “911 Was an Inside Job”.  As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.

In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR.  It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.

I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing.   “America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ” and “America is a Christian Nation” and “These Muslims do not share my values and I don’t want them in my backyard”.  Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life.  And I started to follow the story with great interest.

On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, “Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro”.  Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice.  Once it was broken in half and another time the words “Not Welcome” were spray painted over it.

Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches.  Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that’s putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble.  And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this.  And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would.  I wanted to show the world what I was seeing.  So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, “Not Welcome”.

I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade.  Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue.  I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque.  I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001.  Two Congressional candidates, both promising to “stop the Islamic training camp” showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro.  The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read “Google the Koran” and “Stop Homegrown Terrorism” and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.

About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center.  The court proceedings were truly a circus with a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary.  That legal action had failed and failed miserably.  And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward.  In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.

Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves “Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom” put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance.  A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil.  Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall.  And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read “No Mosque” while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera.  And I got it.  One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that “All them Mooslums should be shipped home” even the ones who were born here.

Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square.  It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit.  Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert.  When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only “Hi, Kevin” he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being “racially harassed”.  This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news.  This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, “Hey, stop racially harassing me” and then we would all have a big laugh.  And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was “playing the race card” against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.

CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted.  Soledad O’Brien’s producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called “Islam: In America” and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro.  After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers.  So I declined to license him any of my material.  And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Mufreesboro and was called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door”.  Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.

I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage.  That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time.  The writing was on the wall.  It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.

Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself.  I took sides.  I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it’s not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view.  And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance.  And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore’s blog as well.

Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from.  I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case.  I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain.  But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed.  I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past.  And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie.  It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”).  The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues.  The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day.  I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies.  I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level.  Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right.  The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned.  I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt.  I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned.  Concerned?  Wasn’t this good news?  The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home.  “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters.  I’m scared for them right now”.  After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me.  Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.  I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no.  That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us.  Again he said no.  Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions.  He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at.  He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper.  He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary.  I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true.  It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam.  We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule.  I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset.  And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe.  We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear.  Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought.  I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group.  I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”.  It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated.  I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context.  I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists.  I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations.  I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate.  But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong.  It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around?  When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

The Obama administration’s position on Syria is clear. Administration officials have said that Bashar Assad’s days are numbered and affirmed that the goal is a “democratic transition” that would see Assad deposed from power. President Obama has added moral urgency to the situation, condemning Assad’s brutal 11-month crackdown on dissent and vowing that “cruelty must be confronted for the sake of justice and human dignity.” For all the forcefulness of its intentions, though, the administration has yet to spell out a concrete course for ousting Assad and ending the violence.

Diplomacy seems to be the administration’s preferred strategy for regime change, at least judging from the desperate way in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to win Russian support for a UN Security Council resolution backing Assad’s exit. But as Russia and China’s obdurate refusal to part ways with Assad shows, there will be no such unanimity at the UN. Neither country seems to have been moved by Syria’s humanitarian crisis, as UN ambassador Susan Rice’s admonition that both countries “will have any future blood spilled on their hands” plainly has fallen on deaf ears.

Russia and China’s backing isn’t necessary to tighten sanctions or to seize the regime’s finances abroad, but these measures may have reached diminishing returns. Switzerland and the EU have already frozen Assad and his lieutenants’ assets and it’s not clear how much more can be done on this front. Powerful economic sanctions have already been pushed through by the European Union, Turkey, and the Arab League, meanwhile, and while their impact will certainly be felt in Damascus it’s unlikely to be decisive. As international sanctions expert Daniel Drezner points out, sanctions alone rarely collapse regimes as determined to hold on to power as Assad’s.

The administration’s least-preferred option – the use of force – is also unlikely. Although the Department of Defense has said that it is reviewing all options for Syria, the administration has been at pains to stress that it has not been considering a Libya-style military intervention. Speaking with NBC’s Matt Lauer last Sunday, President Obama stressed that it is “very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention.” Obama added that he thought that was “possible.”

This reluctance may seems strange coming from the Obama administration, particularly considering its willingness to use force in Libya, where Moammar Qadaffi only threatened the kind of collective punishment and humanitarian disaster that Assad has already inflicted on Syrians. But according to national security reporter Laura Rozen, the administration considers Syria a different case for several reasons.

First, Syria’s location matters more than Libya’s. Syria’s neighbors – Iraq, Israel, Turkey – make the threat of regional instability arising from military intervention far more worrying. There is also the matter of Syria’s internal sectarian divisions and its fractured political opposition. Not only are there long-running tensions between the majority Sunnis and the Alawaite sect of Assad, but there is feuding even among the two leading opposition groups, the Syrian National Council and the National Coordination Body, who fell out most recently after disagreeing about the use of foreign force against Assad.

[Editor's note: The radical Left in America is once again mobilizing in our communities and on our campuses. Get the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and the new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left by reading the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]

The latest attempt by the radical Left to capitalize on the neo-communist movement known as OWS is emanating from an old source. The “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which derives its name, inspiration, and mission from the original SDS of the ’60s, is calling for a “Day of Action” scheduled for March 1st. The rhetoric is tiresomely familiar. “We believe that education is a right, not an economic privilege for the advantaged,” says their website. ”We demand and fight for a university that is for everyone! … We want student, worker and faculty control over our universities; we should be in control of our own futures and lives.”

Hoping to channel the mob-rage made so fashionable by the broader Occupy movement, it is no surprise who these students blame for their woes. “We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization. They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.”

But don’t count on the campus Left acknowledging government culpability in the crisis it bemoans. It was government, after all, that threatened banks with fines and other restrictions if they refused to lower their lending standards to accommodate mortgage applicants who had no business owning a home. Likewise, government has also facilitated the enormous increases in college tuition. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education discovered college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income rose 147 percent. Why? Because taxpayers are guaranteeing student loans (to the tune of $1 trillion currently)–all of which were taken over by the government in 2010 as part of Obamacare. Thus, colleges have no incentive whatsoever to lower their costs.

Furthermore, one of the critical funding sources for colleges is endowment funds. Even in the down economy of 2009, such funding totaled more than $300 billion. Who endows universities? Those with enough wealth to give large sums of money away, aka the very “1 percent” those currently attending college love to vilify.

Ironically, the same SDS that calls for “chops from the top,” meaning to overpaid administrators, is the one that is calling for even more of the cost-increasing academic inanity we’ve seen rising for decades: “Ethnic, Women’s, Queer, and African/a studies departments,” along with “reparations [i.e., affirmative action] for bias in admissions owing to [longstanding] systems of oppression.” What they don’t know is that they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

What kind of administrators? Those who facilitate the SDS wish list. Here’s a partial roster of administrators at UC Berkeley: Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion; Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; Academic Enrichment Coordinator; Diversity Program Coordinator; Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; and Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations.

Racism is about many things but it isn’t about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren’t speaking in the genetic sense. What they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.

The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.

Class warfare was not really about the poor. It was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn’t healing that they have in mind.

When your power is a product of social problems, then the failure to locate social problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.

Race has very little to do with racial politics, which rely on the older methodologies of radicalizing slums and using subsidies to elevate community leaders who will support the reformers, all tactics that date back centuries and long predate the politicization of race.

When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race all it did was take the same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along.

Race hasn’t simply been politicized. The practical meaning of the word has been so thoroughly transformed that it does not refer to what most people think that it does. In the liberal lexicon race, like class, is an outcast term. It is a catchall term meaning those who are oppressed by the powerful majority. It is why the left will use accusations of racism in completely inappropriate ways that make no sense in relation to the dictionary definition.

Muslims are not a race, but they have been classified as an oppressed group. Socialism is not a race, but they are the official representatives of all oppressed peoples. To insult either one is to be “racist” because racism refers to majority oppression and nothing else. To be a racist is to oppose or denigrate the moral worldview of the reformers without reference to the skin color of any of the parties. Therefore African-American opponents of President Clinton were racists because the terminology of race had nothing to do with the preexisting racial construct. The idea of race as it had existed in the United States no longer applied. Words like racism were part of the Newspeak grammar which insisted on appropriating the moral force of the old meanings, but without actually employing those meanings.

This liberal lexicon is the Newspeak that is all around us. It relies on the moral power of words while first subtly and then grossly changing their definitions until they no longer have anything to do with the old meaning. The process begins with politicized terminology and ends when the core terminology of a free country like “rights,” “freedom” and “democracy”  no longer have anything in common with their formal definitions. Their new definitions are those that serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.

Regardless of what they are supposed to mean, progressivism, racial tolerance and social justice all mean the same thing. And so in the inverse, racism, conservatism and small government also add up to variations of the same idea in the liberal lexicon. Which might not be so much of a problem if it were not also the lexicon being used by the media, academics, politicians, judges and the entertainment industry to name a few groups who are invested in the altered meanings because they are also invested in the ideology that those meanings support.

Ideologies define a worldview where for compelling moral reasons the ideologues are the only ones who can be safely allowed to rule. Imposing this worldview on the people as often as possible and through every possible venue from news reporting to novels and from music to the educational system allows for the perpetual power of the ideologues. So long as the cause is just then no possible overreach of power or abuse can ever justify removing the ideologues from their petty thrones.

Not long ago, I used this space to ask if the Arab Spring was like 2009 (the failed Twitter Revolution in Iran), 1989 (the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe) or 1979 (the Islamist revolution in Iran). Like others, I believed the end of Mubarak’s autocratic rule was something to celebrate, but I worried that what ultimately replaces Mubarak may not be worth celebrating. And sadly, a year later, elements of the Arab Spring are starting to resemble 1979, as evidenced by the brewing hostage crisis in Egypt.

Nineteen American citizens working for well-known and well-established nonprofit groups are being held on trumped-up charges that they tried to destabilize Egypt. Their offices were raided in late December, some are holed up in the U.S. embassy and all of them have been barred from flying out of Egypt. As Time magazine notes, December is significant. December is when Congress passed a number of conditions for aid to the Egyptian military, including proving a “commitment to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, progress toward democratic reforms, and the protection of free expression, association and religion.” Not only are the last two of those conditions not being met by Egypt, but Time adds that Cairo’s case against the Americans is “propagated by the military-led regime.”

That’s also an important part of the story. To its credit, the Egyptian military played a key role in persuading Mubarak to cede power, and in preventing Egypt from careening into chaos. The Egyptian military is now trying to serve as something of a referee/power broker/king-maker. Up until this crisis, Washington recognized that while having the Egyptian military in charge is not ideal, it may be necessary to hold the political pieces together in Egypt. But if this is how the “responsible” parties in post-Mubarak Egypt are going to treat Americans, then it’s time to reevaluate everything about this interests-based relationship. Hopefully, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey is conveying that very message in his talks in Cairo.

The clear, unambiguous and indeed private message should be threefold:

• The U.S. aid spigot—an average of $2 billion per year since 1979—will be shut off if these hostages aren’t freed and if post-Mubarak Egypt continues to resemble post-Shah Iran. As Time puts it, “if Egypt’s generals get away with the NGO crackdown and the political humiliation of its biggest foreign benefactor, it’s going to set a dangerous precedent for other regimes testing the waters of democracy.”

• The United States is prepared to radically rethink its security posture and force structure in the region. There are many other countries in the region that will take U.S. aid dollars and assist the U.S. in protecting its strategic interests.

• U.S. force will be employed if American interests or citizens are again threatened. Washington cannot allow another far-off revolution to hold America hostage.

Heretofore, debt-defaulting Greece has operated on Raiders of the Lost Ark-logic: “You throw me the idol; I’ll throw you the whip.” Its European Union and International Monetary Fund sugar daddies have tired of sending cash without budget reforms in return. On Thursday, they rejected Greece’s newest amorphous pledge of budget cuts later for billions now. Burned before by big promises with no fulfillment, the Eurogroup sent a clear message to the Greeks through its chair Jean-Claude Juncker: “no disbursement before implementation.”

But with Greece already forcing creditors to take a haircut, and refusing to make good on its pledged reforms, why would European nations agree to throw more good money after bad?

A coalition of Greek political leaders came to an agreement on Thursday to narrow the chasm between revenues and receipts in hopes of paving the way for $172 billion in new loans from the European Union. But EU finance ministers balked at the proposal that contained very little in specified cuts for non-defense-related government expenditures. The European finance ministers demanded from the troubled nation $325 billion in new cuts and parliament’s preapproval of the plan before it will agree to a further bailout. Greece, which is already de facto in default since other nations are paying its creditors, stands to legally default on March 20 if it doesn’t receive a cash infusion.

The refusal to implement promised budgetary and economic structural reforms is a tacit admission that Greek politicians believe the debt crisis just isn’t their fault. This is a popular sentiment within Greece, muted only when going abroad with hat in hand. Foreign bankers, EU bureaucrats, and American capitalists are favorite scapegoats according to internal Greek rhetoric. If outsiders are to blame for the crisis, why should Greeks reform their economic system? It’s everyone else who has the problem, after all, not Greece.

Recently the Partij voor Moslim Nederland (Party for Muslim Netherlands), which already enjoys a significant presence in various municipal governments in that country, announced that it intended to run candidates for the Dutch Parliament.  An article in Forbes listed the party’s major principles, which included limits on “offensive” speech about religion; the criminalization of blasphemy and of the destruction of religious texts; immediate admission of Turkey to the EU; an end to support for Israel; and the free and unimpeded importation of Muslim brides from abroad.

Whether to work within existing parties, or to concentrate on forming and building up separate Muslim parties, has always been a key strategic question for the soft jihadists of Europe.  Though there are Muslims in Norway who are prominent members of several large traditional parties, the country now has a Muslim party too.  Founded in 2009 as the Independent Labour Party, it was obliged later that year to change its name to the Samtidspartiet (Contemporary Party) because of official concerns that it might be confused with the Norwegian Labor Party.  When outlining the party’s goals, its founder, Norwegian-Pakistani Ghuffor Butt, focused on a desire for lower taxes, gas prices, and the like – making it sound like rather a libertarian party for Muslims.  Formerly a cinema director, producer, and political journalist in Pakistan, as well as an actor in some twenty Pakistani movies, Butt ran – and, as far as I know, still runs – a successful store in Grønland, a largely Muslim district in Oslo, that sells Bollywood films.

Yet lest these credentials suggest he was a “liberal” and “modern” Muslim, Butt made it clear, in answer to a Dagbladet journalist’s questions, that his party’s other objectives included lifting the ban on hijab in the police force, establishing exclusively Muslim schools and hospitals, instructing immigrant-group children in their parents’ native tongue rather than in Norwegian, easing residence-visa rules, using taxpayer money to fund the building of mosques and pay the salaries of imams, punishing those who had reprinted the Danish Muhammed cartoons, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and prohibiting homosexuality.  (Later, presumably loath to offend some of his allies on the left, Butt made a phone call to Dagbladet to walk back the bit about gays: while homosexual conduct is forbidden by Islam, he said, the party did not intend to change Norwegian law on the subject.  Yeah, right.)

“If Norwegians didn’t drink alcohol, have premarital sex, and eat pork,” Butt told Dagbladet, “they’d be the world’s best Muslims.”  He also suggested that Mossad was responsible for 9/11 and echoed the popular myth that Jews hadn’t shown up for work at the World Trade Center that day.

It is interesting to note that the official launch of this putatively Norwegian political party took place in Pakistan – yet another apparent indication of the way in which many Norwegian-Pakistanis view their relationships to their old and new homelands.  As Butt explained, it was easier to reach Norwegian Pakistani voters in Norway this way because they didn’t watch Norwegian TV: thanks to satellite dishes, their sets are tuned to the Pakistani channels on which he was planning to do interviews.  “In three years, Oslo’s mayor will be a Norwegian-Pakistani,” he predicted (wrong so far), and expressed the hope that within fifteen years a “second-generation immigrant” would be Norway’s prime minister.